Gourav Kumar

Gourav Kumar, Soumyadip Maity, Ruddra dev Roychoudhury et al.

Cooperation among humans makes it easy to execute tasks and navigate seamlessly even in unknown scenarios. With our individual knowledge and collective cognition skills, we can reason about and perform well in unforeseen situations and environments. To achieve a similar potential for a robot navigating among humans and interacting with them, it is crucial for it to acquire the ability for easy, efficient and natural ways of communication and cognition sharing with humans. In this work, we aim to exploit human gestures which is known to be the most prominent modality of communication after the speech. We demonstrate how the incorporation of gestures for communicating spatial understanding can be achieved in a very simple yet effective way using a robot having the vision and listening capability. This shows a big advantage over using only Vision and Language-based Navigation, Language Grounding or Human-Robot Interaction in a task requiring the development of cognition and indoor navigation. We adapt the state-of-the-art modules of Language Grounding and Human-Robot Interaction to demonstrate a novel system pipeline in real-world environments on a Telepresence robot for performing a set of challenging tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first pipeline to couple the fields of HRI and language grounding in an indoor environment to demonstrate autonomous navigation.

Pushkal Katara, Y V S Harish, Harit Pandya et al.

The simplicity of the visual servoing approach makes it an attractive option for tasks dealing with vision-based control of robots in many real-world applications. However, attaining precise alignment for unseen environments pose a challenge to existing visual servoing approaches. While classical approaches assume a perfect world, the recent data-driven approaches face issues when generalizing to novel environments. In this paper, we aim to combine the best of both worlds. We present a deep model predictive visual servoing framework that can achieve precise alignment with optimal trajectories and can generalize to novel environments. Our framework consists of a deep network for optical flow predictions, which are used along with a predictive model to forecast future optical flow. For generating an optimal set of velocities we present a control network that can be trained on the fly without any supervision. Through extensive simulations on photo-realistic indoor settings of the popular Habitat framework, we show significant performance gain due to the proposed formulation vis-a-vis recent state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, we show a faster convergence and an improved performance in trajectory length over recent approaches.

Aseem Saxena, Harit Pandya, Gourav Kumar et al.

Present image based visual servoing approaches rely on extracting hand crafted visual features from an image. Choosing the right set of features is important as it directly affects the performance of any approach. Motivated by recent breakthroughs in performance of data driven methods on recognition and localization tasks, we aim to learn visual feature representations suitable for servoing tasks in unstructured and unknown environments. In this paper, we present an end-to-end learning based approach for visual servoing in diverse scenes where the knowledge of camera parameters and scene geometry is not available a priori. This is achieved by training a convolutional neural network over color images with synchronised camera poses. Through experiments performed in simulation and on a quadrotor, we demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our approach for a wide range of camera poses in both indoor as well as outdoor environments.